So long, New York

The Practical Polymath #104

Hi friends,

This is the last time I get to say it: greetings from Brooklyn.

Tomorrow at 9am, the movers will pack up seven years of our lives.

We’re headed to London.

Until next time,

Florian

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So long, New York

“I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.”

Joan Didion

It’s 8.15am. I’m standing in the courtyard of my son's school. Together, we watch the older kids play soccer before the whistle blows. For a second, I see the fifth grader version of Jude, four years from now, in this same courtyard, chasing the ball. But this will happen elsewhere, with other friends. It’s a strange thing, to catch flashes of futures on which the door is quietly closing. Nostalgia for things that haven’t happened yet.

I’m counting down the days. Every routine tastes like future memory.

I will miss the New Yorkers I know. The community slowly sewn over the years. The friends who stayed and those who left. The doormen who greeted our newborn children. The crossing guard who hands out fist bumps with infectious morning energy. The barista who knows it’s always cortado, always to stay. The daycare teacher who invariably reports my one-year-old daughter “had a good day.” The Taekwondo instructor who has to redo my son's belt after me.

I’ll miss the New Yorkers, I don’t know.

The old men playing dominoes near my son’s school. They’ve claimed an empty lot and filled it with the sound of salsa music, of dominoes slapping the board and jovial bickering peppered with the occasional swear word in Spanish. They’ve earned their peace. I keep walking thinking everything is going to be all right.

The new families, young couples, foreign students, dog walkers who live in the surrounding buildings. I don’t know their names but the glow of their windows is a quiet reminder that New York is a communal experience. We share a first row to the constant spectacle of planes and helicopters flying by our living room windows. We sip our morning coffees watching the boats slide in and out of the New York harbor.

The fellow runners pounding the asphalt at Pier 6 before sunrise. I don’t know their names but we share a quiet addiction to that introspective hour before the city wakes. Soon, the drilling will start, the screeching, the honking, the wailing. For now, only the gentle hum of early commuters on the BQE and the Staten Island Ferry blowing its horn.

I don’t know the names of the morning commuters getting off at Fulton Center. We flood the central hallway in the hundreds, marching in opposite directions, up and down the staircase. No bodies collide. Together, we’ve mastered the art of choreographed chaos.

This morning, I walked my son to summer camp.

“Do you know how many days we have left in New York?”, I asked him.

“No, don’t tell me”, he answered. “I want to focus on summer camp.”

Lateral Thought

“New York is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance, bringing to a single compact arena the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the merchant. It carries on its lapel the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings.”

E.B. White